Sorry, Seattle. It’s not Tom Cruise’s boat

I went down to Fishermen’s Terminal today to follow through on an e-mail we received from a Seattle woman who said she wanted to know if the big white yacht she saw while driving over Ballard Bridge belonged to Tom Cruise. The reason for her suspicion: The name of the boat, Suri. That, and she saw a helicopter parked on it!

Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise and Suri Cruise (Getty Images)

So I walked the docks from one end to the other, talked with several fishermen who said they’d seen the boat — what they thought was an old crabber converted to a megayacht. With a helicopter pad. Some had seen the boat this morning moored in its usual place, just off the northwest docks.

But no sign of it today when I wandered over around 11 a.m.

I went into the Port of Seattle office at the terminal and spoke to the moorage coordinator, Ross Perry. Did he know about a boat, name of Suri, moored there? Had he heard the rumors it belonged to Tom Cruise?

“I’ve heard those rumors too,” he said.

But could he verify whose boat it was? “No.”

He wouldn’t cough up the name of the renter (a foreign company), but he did say the boat had been here for a few weeks and left just this morning. Shucks! But he did say there were no celebrity sightings. No Tom. No Katie. No baby Suri.

Three strikes. I’m out.

But, really, would a celebrity or even a celebrity boater name his boat after his equally famous child? Isn’t that a little too obvious? Whatever else, it stuck out among the working fishermen’s boats at the terminal, and gave them something to speculate about for a few weeks. But I found out the truth.

Back at the office, I discovered the blog, Megayacht News, which described Suri as a 172-foot shadow vessel with the “best features of a luxury yacht and yacht support ship. Inside, she includes a spacious VIP suite with a sitting room, two additional guest staterooms outfitted the way they’d be on a traditional yacht, a gymnasium the size of a guest cabin, two crew cabins and a crew galley, a skylounge, and a sun deck.”

That led me to Capt. Stan Antrim, who runs Yacht Escort Ships, “the only company to deliver fully classed yacht support vessels and shadow boats.” He said, definitively, that it was not Tom Cruise’s boat. He would not identify the owner and only said he was a “very wealthy private American owner.” It is a converted crab boat, the former Fierce Contender, which the owner bought here in Seattle.

Not only does it have a helicopter pad, it has a built-in garage under the pad, a hovercraft, landing craft, a handmade mahogany boat, sport fishing boats, jet skis and kayaks. It’s on its way to New Zealand.